Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Swimming the Atlantic

I learned today that Google Maps provides transatlantic driving
directions. For example, if you choose to
drive from Washington, DC to London, England,
Google suggests driving to Boston. You navigate to downtown Boston and
then:

20.

Turn right at Long Wharf

0.1 mi

21.

Swim across the Atlantic Ocean

3,462 miles

and then continue on through northern France, through the
Chunnel and on to
London. The whole trip will take 29 days, 14 hours.

Because I'm a geek, I wanted to know how fast I'd have to swim to
achieve this. I've never considered swimming across an entire ocean
before. Isolating this route to just the departure and arrival points
for the swim (Boston to Le Havre, France), Google says it takes about
29 days.

Next pull up the handy unix/linux tool called units. It does all sorts
of conversions, even converting such things as speeds.

You have: 3462 miles/29 days
You want: mph
* 4.9741379
/ 0.20103986

That's almost five miles per hour. That sounds pretty fast. Is it
reasonable? Ask wikipedia. The
current world record for swimming 1500 m is 14:34.56.

That's 3.8 miles per hour. So, even record holder Grant Hackett at his
peak 5.5 years ago, couldn't swim across the Atlantic in 29 days even
if he were to swim at his world record pace for 24 hours per day.

Update: Geoff Fox blogged about this also. In fact, Geoff's post was probably the origin of how I found out about this since the original link that was sent to me came from a relative who reads Geoff's blog.